Editor's note: Christian Müller is now at Germany's Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources. A version of this paper won the Best Student Poster Presentation award from the 2000 SEG Annual Meeting in Calgary.

Ocean island systems such as Hawaii and the Canaries have been built by large volumes of magma intrusions and by lava extrusions based on intraplate volcanism. The Canary Islands, off the Northwest African continental margin (Figure 1), were formed by hot-spot volcanism where subaerial volcanic activity started on Fuerteventura about 20 million years ago.